The advance of electronic-mechanical related technologies consequently results in swift improvement in the peripheral accessories, such as hard disk drives, optical disk drives, scanning machines, and printing machines. As for the optical disk drive, a commercial optical disk is an inevitable storage medium at present since it is cheap and capable of storing up to several GBs of music or image data for a long time. The BD (Blu-ray Disc) of the new generation even has a storage capacity of several tens of GBs such that the optical disk drive plays an even more important role in data storage.
For the purpose of further improving the data access rate of the optical disk drive, the optical disk drive of new generation generally has higher rotation speed so as to shorten the reading/writing time for the data. For instance, the optical disk of the 20X DVD (Digital Versatile Disk) rotates 10000 RPM (Revolutions per minute). Under such high speed, the centrifugal force suffered by the optical disk during the rotation of the optical disk is relatively large, resulting in the easy breaking of the optical disk that rotates in high speed. Note that, the optical disk is mainly made of plastic material, which is natively fragile. Therefore, the cracks occur easily on the supported central portion of the optical disk during the high-speed rotation of the optical disk in the optical disk drive, causing the burst of the optical disk. In addition, deficiencies, such as bubbles on the surface, uneven coating on the surface, wrap of the optical disk, eccentric disk, and so forth, may also occur during the manufacture of the optical disk. The imperfect optical disk has a higher probability of occurring breaking during its high-speed rotation and its broken pieces cause larger impact force.
Please refer to FIG. 1, a conventional optical disk drive with a protection design against a broken disk is shown. The tray 10 of the optical disk drive is retractable upon pressing of the on/off button of the optical disk drive 1 to allow the consumer to place or take out the optical disk. After putting the optical disk on the upper surface of the tray 10, the consumer can press the on/off button again to retract the tray 10 into the optical disk drive 1. In addition, a door 100 is mounted on the front end of the tray 10. When the tray 10 is retracted into the optical disk drive 1, the door 100 is roughly aligned with the faceplate 12 of the optical disk drive 1. It is worthy to note that the door 100 and the faceplate 12 are both made of plastic material. Therefore, when the breaking of the optical disk occurs, the flying broken disk may hit and damage the door 100 and the faceplate 12. Especially, under the influence of centrifugation created by the high-speed rotation, the flying force of the broken disk is considerably large so it may destroy the structure of the door 100 and the faceplate 12 and fly to the outside of the optical disk drive 1, causing injury to the consumer.
Please refer to FIG. 1, for the purpose of shielding the broken disk, a bended part 140 is formed on the front end of a conventional iron upper cover 14 to prevent the broken disk from hitting the faceplate 12 and the door 100 directly and perpendicularly. The iron upper cover 14 is able to resist the broken disk that have larger impact force since the iron upper cover 14 has a higher strength.
However, it is worthy to mention that the iron upper cover 14 is made of rigid material so it has a limited ability to retard the flying of the broken disk. In addition, after hitting the bended part 140, the broken disk will be rebounded therefrom to hit and damage other components inside the optical disk drive 1. In addition, a gap S with a value about 1.0 cm inevitably exists between the tray 10 and the bended part 140 of the iron upper cover 14 for preventing the bended part 140 from hindering the optical disk when the tray 10 moves into or out of the optical disk drive 1. However, the smaller pieces of the broken disk may therefore pass through the gap S and destroy the structure of the door 100 and the faceplate 12 in such a manner that the pieces flies to the outside of the optical disk drive 1 after deforming the faceplate 12.
Please refer to FIG. 2, an optical disk drive with another conventional protection design against broken disk is shown. Instead of having a bended part 140 on the front end of the iron upper cover 14, the design shown in FIG. 2 provides an inclined retaining block 16 on the inside surface of the faceplate 12 to shield the broken disk. The inclined retaining block 16 provides better effect on buffering the impact force from the broken disk since it is made of plastic material or other soft material. In addition, the impact direction of the broken disk can be changed by the inclined surface of the inclined retaining block 16 in such a manner that the broken disk is scattered to the tray 10, the faceplate 12 and door 100 along the inclined surface of the inclined retaining block 16 as indicated by the arrow in FIG. 2. However, as described above, it is worthy to note that a gap S with a value about 1.0 cm still inevitably exists between the tray 10 and the inclined retaining block 16 to prevent the inclined retaining block 16 from hindering the optical disk and the tray 10 from moving into or out of the optical disk drive 1. However, the larger piece of the broken disk may pass through the gap S and may hit or destroy the structures of the door 100 and the faceplate 12 in such a manner that the piece even flies to the outside of the optical disk drive 1. Therefore, it is an important task in developing and designing the high-speed optical disk drive to provide a safer design to prevent the broken disk from flying to the outside of the optical disk drive.